In Honor of Elan S. Carr, the U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy for Monitoring & Combating anti-Semitism, who was inaugurated on 11 April 2019. Special Envoy Carr is an Iraqi Jew (descendant of Baghdad’s Chief Rabbi in the mid-1800s, Hakham Abdallah Somekh), an Arabic speaker, & U.S. Army Veteran. In 2003, he celebrated Hanukkah in a former palace of Saddam Hussein by lighting a Hanukkah Lamp sculpted by Oded Halahmy, the renowned Baghdad-born artist, proprietor of the Pomegranate Gallery in Jaffa & Soho, and a Distinguished Member of the ASF’s Board of Directors.
Please join the ASF and our friends & partners—the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, Sephardic Heritage Alliance, Inc., Moroccan Americans in New York, Philos Project, Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York, and others—by signing the Combat anti-Semitism Pledge in support of Special Envoy Carr.
Sephardi Ideas Monthly is a continuing series of essays from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought that is delivered to your inbox on the second Monday of every month.
April’s issue of Sephardi Ideas Monthly features Prof. Daniel Elazar’s 1993 Introduction to The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, by Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg. Prof. Elazar (1934-1999) served as the first President of The American Sephardi Federation from 1973-75 and enjoyed a highly successful career as a political scientist, specializing in the Jewish political tradition and Federalism. Prof. Elazar also studied various issues connected to Israel and world Jewry before making Aliyah to Israel where he founded and served as President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Prof. Elazar’s approach to Sephardi concerns was grounded in his family’s Ottoman-Sephardi identity, but it extended to encompass the rich mosaic culture of Jewish communities that constitute the different parts of the Jewish experience. This month’s examination of Indian-Jewish identity wonderfully illustrates the broad vision that continues to animate the American Sephardi Federation and the ASF’s Institute of Jewish Experience today.
Professor Daniel J. Elazar, A”H, first President of The American Sephardi Federation and Founder of The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Photo courtesy of JCPA)
The Last Jews of Cochin
Prof. Elazar begins his Introduction, fittingly enough, by examining why the Jewish people is called, in Hebrew, am olam. The term, writes Prof. Elazar, “has been translated as ‘a world people,’ but, in fact, means much more than that. Olam can be translated ‘world,’ but is better translated ‘universe.’” The Jewish people is thus a “universal people.” As such, it’s no surprise to find a deeply rooted Jewish community in Cochin along India’s southwestern Malabar coast.
Unsurprisingly, writes Prof. Elazar, “[T]he authors… emphasize what was unique about Cochin Jewry.” Nevertheless, Prof. Elazar also notes how the Indian commitment to traditional Jewish practice renders the Jews of Cochin immediately recognizable, even familiar, to anyone conversant in traditional Jewish life:
[T]he outside reader cannot help but being impressed by what was ordinary about them, the way in which they lived like any other traditional Jewish community within much the same framework of tradition… Having grown up in the American Middle West and West hearing about the ‘exotic’ Jews of India, it was something of a revelation to discover exactly how unexotic they were to one who observed Jewish tradition.
What was the specific content of Indian Jewish practice? Noting that Jewish life can be divided into three ketarim (crowns), namely, “Torah, kehunah (priesthood), and malkhut (royal or civil),” Prof. Elazar writes that, according to Katz and Goldberg, the Jews of Cochin emphasized the priestly and royal dimensions of Jewish life in keeping with the influence of Hindu emphases on purity, purification, and the majestic character of the Divine. As for the question of how Indian Jews managed to avoid assimilation in an environment free from anti-Semitism, Elazar writes:
Indian society, with its several major religions and further division within Hinduism into four major castes, a fifth of outcasts, and over 3,000 subcastes, tolerates wide diversity but does not permit people born into one group to cross over into another or even to associate with the others beyond the public square, since the food taboos of every religious community, caste and subcaste mean that they cannot eat with one another. Nothing separates more than that. The Jewish community could fit into India as another caste.
Prof. Elazar concludes his Introduction by noting how, in their description of the end of Cochin Jewry, the authors, “intentionally or not… make the case for Zionism in the modern and postmodern worlds.” How so?
“All too often,” writes Prof. Elazar, “the case for Zionism is made out to be one of finding a refuge for persecuted Jews.” But the Cochin Jews didn’t experience anti-Semitism. Instead, “…modernity, which destroyed traditional society everywhere it touched, destroyed theirs as well, making it impossible to maintain their old way of life in the diaspora.” As modernization and secularization began to threaten the survival of the Indian Jewish community, “[T]hose who wanted to remain Jews felt the necessity to move to the Jewish state where being Jewish was protected by the fact of living within a politically separated and independent civil society.” And even if Indian Jewish practice was more stringently observed back in India, nevertheless, in Israel, “[T]hey could survive as Jews, something that had become increasingly difficult in the ‘old country.’”
Sephardi Ideas Monthly is very pleased to present our readers with Prof. Daniel Elazar’s Introduction to The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, another example of stimulating writing from the wide-ranging corpus of articles, essays, and books composed by the ASF’s first President.
The featured sage for the month of April is Hakham Ezra Zion Melamed (1904-1994), the communal leader and celebrated academic scholar of Bible and Talmud, as well as lexicographer of Aramaic.
Born in Shiraz, Persia, in 1904, Melamed was three years old when he made Aliyah to Israel with his mother. Melamed’s father had moved to Israel the year before in order to assume leadership of Jerusalem’s Persian community.
After receiving a thorough yeshiva education, Melamed turned his prodigious talents to the academic study of Judaism. He was one of the first students at Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Jewish Studies program, and he obtained his doctorate in 1941. In 1964, he was appointed professor at the Hebrew University. He also served as a faculty member in the Department of Talmud at Tel Aviv University, and was a research fellow at Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language.
But Melamed was no ivory-tower scholar. Following in the footsteps of his father, he also served as the rabbi of the Persian Jewish community at Jerusalem. He regularly gave sermons in synagogues and extensively engaged in communal charity work.
Hakham Melamed published numerous articles and books during his distinguished career and earned many prizes, including the Yakir Yerushalaim Honorary Citizen Award, the Tchernichovsky Award, the David Yellin College Prize, and the Israel Prize for Bible Commentary and Torah Literature. He passed away in 1994 and was buried at Jerusalem.
The following passage, taken from his 1960 book, Pirkei Minhag VeHalakha (“Explorations of Customs and Halakhah”), wonderfully illustrates Hakham Melamed’s commitment to researching ways in which charity was performed within his community, research that, needless to say, had practical applications:
As a child, I knew an old beadle (whose name was Agabebe ben Yitzhak Shemesh) who would go from door to door on Friday afternoons, collecting bread and cooked food for distribution in Jerusalem's poor neighborhoods. He would deliver what he collected to the poorest families and to those with many children.
When the World War broke out in 1914, this custom was halted and, for some reason, has never resumed. I am acquainted with several Mizrachi families who, to this day, do not sit for their Sabbath Eve meal before their mothers have delivered some foods and bread to the poor of their neighborhood.
The New Indian Express meets up with Jews from across the globe, who gathered in Cochin (Kochi) to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Paradesi Synagogue.
(Screenshot courtesy of The New Indian Express/Youtube)
16 April - Georgian Jews Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City
Please register here
or call: 1.800.838.3006 Light dinner reflecting the cuisine of Bukharian, Georgian, and Kavkazi Jews will be served
Back by popular demand, the American Sephardi Federation’s Young Sephardi Scholars Series is excited to once again host a 3-part learning and cultural series about the Russian-speaking Jewish (RSJ) communities of the Greater Sephardic world. The cultures and histories of Bukharian, Georgian, and Kavkazi (Mountain) Jews are situated at the fascinating, yet lesser known, intersection of RSJ, Sephardic and Mizrahi life. Led by Ruben Shimonov, this multimedia learning series will provide a unique opportunity to explore the multilayered and rich stories of the three communities.
Co-sponsored by JDC Entwine. This project was created as part of the COJECO BluePrint Fellowship, supported by COJECO and Genesis Philanthropy Group.
Ruben Shimonov is a Jewish educator, community builder, and social innovator based in New York City. His multilayered identity as an immigrant, Bukharian, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jew continuously informs his commitment to the cultural and global diversity of the Jewish people. Ruben has previously brought this passion to his work at Queens College Hillel as Director of Cross-Community Engagement and Education, where he had the unique role of cultivating Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish student life on campus. Ruben is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sephardic-Mizrahi Q Network—a one-of-a-kind, grassroots movement that works to build a vibrant and supportive community for LGBTQ Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. He also serves as Vice-President for Education and Community Engagement on the American Sephardi Federation's Young Leadership Board, as well as the Director of Educational Experiences and Programming for the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee of New York. Ruben was recently named among The Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36” emerging Jewish communal leaders and changemakers. He is also a 2018 ASF Broome & Allen Fellow, as well as a 2018 COJECO Blueprint Fellow. His speaking engagements include presenting at the Limmud Festival in the United Kingdom, one of the largest annual Jewish learning conferences in the world.
The American Sephardi Federation invites Sephardi World Weekly readers to attend this event by our Partner, the American Jewish Historical Society:
“This talk celebrates the new groundbreaking work of two social historians of Iranian Jewish life and community in the 20th century between immigrations and diasporas in Iran, Israel, and the US, paying tribute to the work of HIAS in helping Jews immigrate and resettle in the US in the years post the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Leah Mirakhor is Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) and the Program in American Studies at Yale University. Mirakhors writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, African American Review, The James Baldwin Review, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Mirakhor is the author of ‘After the Revolution to the War on Terror: Iranian Jewish American Literature in the United States’, which appeared in Studies in American Jewish Literature 35.1 (2016).
Lior Sternfeld is a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in Jewish (and other minorities) histories of the region. Sternfeld teaches at the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State University. Sternfelds new book, Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth Century Iran, examines the integration of the Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century. This book examines the development of the Iranian Jewish communities vis-à-vis ideologies and institutions such as Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, among others.
AJHS has just finished [processing] the records of the organization HIAS The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the organization that helped families Iran, both Jewish and non-Jewish, immigrate and resettle in the US since the 1970s.”
Friday, 10 May at 3:00PM
Wednesday, 15 May at 8:00PM Opening Night; Followed by After Party Friday, 17 May at 3:00PM
Wednesday, 22 May at 8:00PM
Wednesday, 29 May at 8:00PM
Sunday, 2 June at 6:00PM Closing Night; Followed by After Party
Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City
An opera by Giuseppe Verdi as adapted by and starring David Serero in the role of Nabucco. Building on the Biblical accounts of the Babylonian Exile found in Jeremiah and Daniel, Verdi's Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar) combines political and love intrigues with some of the greatest songs ever written (including Va, pensiero, The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves).
Journalist, historian, and author Marc Leepson will present a lively talk (complete with vintage images) of a little-known but important part of Sephardic Jewish-American history and American historic preservation: how U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah P. Levy and his nephew Jefferson M. Levy--who owned Monticello from 1834-1923--on two occasions repaired, restored, and preserved the Thomas Jefferson's iconic house in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The talk will include a history of the Levy-Phillips-Nunez Family, one of the most accomplished Jewish-American families of the 18th and 19th centuries. It begins with the arrival in 1733 of Dr. Samuel Nunez, a leader of a group of forty Sephardic Jews who fled Portugal and were among the founders of Savannah, Georgia. It includes the biographies of Uriah Levy (a fifth generation American, born in Philadelphia in 1792, who went on to a distinguished career in the U.S. Navy) and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who was born in New York City, and became a prominent lawyer, a hugely successful real estate and stock speculator, and a three-term member of Congress.
The heart of the story is Uriah and Jefferson Levy's stewardship of Monticello, without which the house very likely would not have survived.
Thursday, 13 June at 3:00PM
Sunday, 16 June at 6:00PM Opening Night; Followed by After Party Tuesday, 18 June at 8:00PM
Thursday, 20 June at 8:00PM
Sunday, 23 June at 6:00PM Closing Night; Followed by After Party
Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City
Shakespeare’s classic tale of love and loss reconceived as the story of two Jewish lovers, one from a Sephardi family and one from an Ashkenazi family. Featuring Ladino and Yiddish songs. Original Jewish adaption by David Serero.
Please register here or email: info@sephardicbrotherhood.com
“Join Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America for the Birthright Israel - Sephardic Israel Trip this Summer from June 27 - July 7! For 10 days, you'll be able to travel around the country with amazing people with Sephardic, Greek, and Turkish backgrounds, all while exploring everything Israel has to offer. You'll be able to ride camels in the desert, raft down the Jordan River, explore the Old City in Jerusalem, and a whole lot more. especially for Sephardic Jews from across the United States.”
Nosotros 2.0, which opened as a one-night pop-up exhibition on 11 October. continues in part as an exhibition in our Leon Levy Gallery.
On view until May
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York City
The Philos Project and American Sephardi Federation cordially invite you to “Nosotros," an exhibition composed of pieces by Latino artists celebrating the shared history and culture of Jewish and Latino communities, and expressing hope for a more positive future. Latin American artistry is rich with Sephardi and Crypto-Jewish allusions and symbols.
The exhibit is titled “Nosotros,” the Spanish word for “us,” and all of the art represents the growing relationship between the Jewish and Hispanic communities in New York and around the world. The exhibit is one of the many things Jesse Rojo, The Philos Project's Hispanic Affairs Director, is doing to bridge the gap between Hispanics and the Middle East.
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The American Sephardi Federation is a proud partner of the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St., New York, NY, 10011).
